


Suburban Angst

by marathemara



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), Magic: The Gathering (Card Game)
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:00:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21822559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marathemara/pseuds/marathemara
Summary: Follow-up to The Guildpact's Clinic, and to theBylaw and OrderD&D campaign. Esther and Zofia are invited to Obort Zunak's funeral, and discover the truth behind his death through a chance encounter with the Bylaw and Order crew.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	1. Azorius Locket

Esther didn’t usually bother to read the World News section on the back of the newspaper. Worrying about the rest of Ravnica wouldn’t help her do her job as head doctor of the only Guildpact-funded medical clinic in the Tenth District; nor did the Dimir office that printed the paper seem to think their readers needed to care about the rest of the city. But today the news from the Sixth District caught her eye.

An Azorius functionary named Obort Zunak had died in a mysterious fire at the Sixth District Bureau of Manufacturing Standards. If Esther was not mistaken, he had also been a relative of her sister’s husband. Maybe his brother. Esther wondered how Tova and her children were doing.

Which reminded her. She fished an envelope out of her uniform pocket. It had come in with the morning mail, with Tova’s handwriting on it, and she’d put off opening it. She took a stirring stick from the coffee tray and eased it under the little blue wax seal stamped with the Azorius priority mail emblem.

It was an invitation to Obort Zunak’s funeral, two days from now at his family estate in the Sixth District, printed on the thick soft paper the Senate used when vellum was not quite necessary. A series of dots and boxes had been penciled into the bottom margin. Esther’s breath caught. This was the secret code at the back of  _ So You Want to Join House Dimir _ . She and Tova had once thought themselves terribly clever, using it to send each other secret messages. As teenagers they’d been disappointed to learn that everyone who read  _ So You Want to Join The _ went through that phase, but they’d never really given up the code.

“What is it?” Zofia looked up from the machine diagram she was annotating on the other side of the break room table.

“Secret message from Tova,” Esther said, silently casting Make Sense to bring the cipher to the front of her memory.

“Oh? How’s your mother doing?” Zofia wasn’t smiling. Tova’s “secret” messages were usually updates on how disapproving Esther’s parents were of her un-Azorius life choices. Hands-on charity work? With the Gateless? And  _ Selesnyans _ ? Not to mention who she’d  _ married _ .

Esther sighed, frowning at the last few characters of the cipher. “I don’t think it’s about Mom.”  _ Stranger in a strange land _ , the message read. “It’s on an invitation to the funeral of one of her in-laws. And either Zunak family funeral customs are very different from ours, or there’s something fishy going on.” She turned the newspaper around to show Zofia the obituary.

Zofia whistled. “That does sound like they’re covering something up.” She squinted at the end of the section. “Two days from now? Looks like we need airship tickets.”

“There’s no question you’re coming with me, with everything else going on.” But that same everything else gave Esther pause. Only a few days ago, a high-profile meeting between the leaders of all the guilds had ended with Azorius’ own Supreme Justice Isperia dead at the hands of the new Golgari guildmaster, and the entire district was tense. Esther’s healers had been seeing more street fight victims than ever. “But who’s gonna run the clinic while we’re away?”

The nurse on duty opened the break room door. “Doctor, someone here to see you.” A hooded figure slipped past him into the room and nodded at him. He left, closing the door behind him, and the visitor reached up with both hands to remove their hood.

It was Deputy Lavinia.

Esther scrambled to her feet. “Deputy, what’s—“

Lavinia held up a hand. Esther trailed off. “Did you get the new ID badge?”

Esther nodded, pulling her brand-new Azorius-stamped locket from under her tunic. Isperia’s replacement had apparently insisted on new identification for all Senate members. From what Esther had heard, he was a lot more...active...than a Supreme Justice was supposed to be. A reformer. She kind of felt sorry for him.

“Give it to me.” Lavinia’s voice was barely audible over the hum of the coffeemaker.

“Why?” Esther looked down at it. It was a small brass disc with the Azorius emblem inlaid on the front.

“What’s going on?” Zofia demanded, setting down her red pen.

Lavinia, still whispering: “I will order you if I have to, Arrester.”

Esther gulped. It had been a long time since she’d been ordered to do anything. She undid the clasp on the locket and handed it over.

“Thank you, Arrester,” Lavinia said. “Do you have a hot knife?”

Zofia pulled something from her jacket pocket and set it on the table. “Red button is on, blue is off.”

Lavinia nodded, setting the locket down on its edge on the table and cutting along the seam with the hot knife. Too late, Esther realized she’d never wondered why the locket was sealed.

The locket fell in two on the table, and Esther and Zofia peered inside. Zofia recognized the wiring that filled the back half. “Shit.”

“Exactly,” said Lavinia. “Dovin Baan’s new ID badges contain tracking devices.” Esther’s jaw dropped.

“We put these on test subjects,” Zofia thought aloud. “What kind of experiment is Baan running?”

“I don’t know,” Lavinia said, “but the Guildpact’s clinic is not going to be part of it. Do you have any Azorius employees?” Esther shook her head. “You’re going to for a couple of weeks, until we figure all this out.”

Esther sat down. Picking up her sister’s invitation, she rubbed the embossed lettering with her thumb and began a breathing exercise.  _ Tell her the job is hers, _ she thought at Zofia,  _ as long as she doesn’t mind us being out of town. We will take no part in undermining the Senate, but we won’t prevent her from investigating the new Supreme Justice. _

“Is she all right?” Lavinia frowned at Esther.

“Just shocked, it looks like,” Zofia said. “She’ll be fine. Anyway, we were just planning to visit her relatives in the Sixth District for a few days, and she just happened to be looking for someone to watch the clinic while we’re away. Do you drink coffee?”


	2. Long Road Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Esther and Zofia travel from the Tenth District to the Sixth and are underwhelmed by the reason they were invited.

**Two days later, before sunrise**

Esther had ridden in an airship exactly once before, on her way to the Lyev academy in the Tenth District as a teenager. The memory of being violently and embarrassingly airsick caused her stomach to try to escape as soon as the ship cast off, and she spent the first half hour of the voyage alternately meditating and casting small healing spells until she fell asleep.

Zofia had spent her entire life in the Tenth District and was fascinated by the view out the window. She spent the entire voyage sketching the sunrise and the buildings below the airship, and annotating her drawings with speculative notes about architecture and guild alignment.

At last they landed in the Seventh District, and Esther felt a great deal better than she’d expected for having spent hours in the air. The next leg of the journey would be by krovod-drawn bus. Zofia bought lunch for the road while Esther leafed through Zofia’s sketchbook and added her own annotations.

The bus ride was only better than the airship ride by virtue of not being in the air. The bus stank of overworked draft animal, rang with the shouts of bored children, and shook every time a wheel found a pothole. “Why are we doing this again?” Esther complained, less than half joking.

“This was your idea, remember,” said Zofia over the top of a dime novel.

“I know,” Esther complained. “I think I get why I feel so bad about it now.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because my parents are going to be there.”

Zofia set her book down and shook her head. “You don’t know that. Your sister’s husband’s kinsman isn’t a very close relative by Azorius standards. Or Izzet standards, really. I think you can avoid them.”

“I mean, I hope so.” Esther wrapped her arms around herself and stared out the window at the deteriorating buildings that lined the road. “And I don’t even know how the people who  _ will _ be there will react to you.”

“Oh, come on, they can’t all be like your parents.” Zofia put an arm around Esther’s shoulders. “Your sister isn’t.”

“Barely.” Esther sighed and kept watching the buildings, but relaxed into Zofia’s arm. “Tova doesn’t really get why I do anything. She means well, and she tries to help, but she’s got no context for the Tenth, or the clinic, or anything that’s not a hundred percent Azorius.”

“At least she tries,” Zofia echoed. “And you like spending time with her, right?”

“I mean, I used to. And I hope I still do.”

“Well, that’s something at least.” Zofia smiled at Esther’s reflection in the window. It took a moment for Esther to notice, but when she did, she smiled back. 

* * *

The bus let them off at a subway station, and the subway took them to Goshan Heights, a short walk from Tova’s house. It was weird being back; Esther hadn’t gone home since she went to the academy; she’d been assigned a beat immediately after graduation, and then sparking had changed her and her world so completely she wasn’t even sure she  _ could _ come back. But now she was here, and at least in broad strokes, nothing had changed except the way she was looking at things.

“What’s King Xicor and the War Boar?” she asked, reading the posters on a lamppost to distract herself from that strange inside-out nostalgia.

“Rings a bell,” Zofia said. “I think they’re a band. The poster says they have two drummers.”

“What does a band need two drummers for?” Esther’s good humor was starting to return.

“I dunno, maybe their shows are really long and they need a backup?”

“Then why don’t they have two of everything?”

“Maybe they do, I saw them in a magazine once and don’t remember what it said about them.”

They reached the address in the invitation, and Esther rang the doorbell. It was opened almost immediately by a preteen human in an Azorius masculine bureaucrat uniform. “Mom!” they yelled. “Aunt Esther’s here!”

“Yona,” a voice shouted back, “what did I tell you about answering the door?”

“But Moooooomm,” Yona whined, “I knew it was Aunt Esther! And she brought Aunt Zofia!” Esther looked her nibling over, casting Make Sense under her breath. The spell told her Yona was using the same basic, uncontrolled mind magic that had gotten her in trouble back in her arrester days. She was going to have to keep an eye on them.

Another child appeared in the doorway, nearly identical to her sibling but with a feminine uniform and a more elaborate hairstyle. “Aunt Esther! You made it!”

“It’s good to see you too, Dvora.” Esther felt like she was practicing the words, more than really saying them, and she made up for it by holding out her arms for a hug.

Dvora hugged her enthusiastically, then stood on tiptoe to whisper into Esther’s ear. “I read your invitation while Mom was writing it. She doesn’t know I know the code. I’m glad you made it; there’s gonna be so many strangers there who I have to pretend like I know them because they’re gonna know me, and--”

Esther nodded. “I know the feeling. I’ll make sure I get a chance to hang out with you and Yona.”

Meanwhile, Zofia had stepped up to the threshold. “May we come in?”

Tova was now standing behind her children, drying her hands on a dishtowel. “Thank goodness you’re here. I didn’t know how I was going to find someone to watch the twins on such short notice.”

Esther blinked at Dvora, who shrugged, then let go of her and stared at her sister. “Watch the twins.”

“Of course, this all happened so suddenly, and I didn’t even know we were Obort’s next of kin until two days ago, so…”

Esther glanced at Zofia, who also shrugged. “All right. Of course.” Esther took a deep breath. “We’ll help in any way we can.”

“Thank you so much.” Tova leaned across the threshold to give Esther a hug, which Esther returned awkwardly. “They can show you to their room; the guests will be arriving for the ceremony at two-thirty, and the reception is at three. Have you had lunch?”

“We ate on the bus,” Zofia said. “Thank you, though.”

“Good, good, one less thing.” Tova was already headed back to the kitchen.

“So wait.” Esther started too late to catch Tova, so she addressed her question to Yona and Dvora. “Why does coming to babysit you need a secret message?”

“I dunno,” Yona said with an especially dramatic shrug. “Mom and Dad haven’t been talking to us much since Uncle Obort went to the Ghost Quarter.” Esther recognized a phrase from her own parents’ vocabulary, and wondered for the first time what it meant.

“Anyway, let’s go play a game.” Dvora grabbed Esther’s hand and led her inside. Zofia and Yona followed.

“I’ve actually got an idea for a game,” Esther said.

“It’s not the Quiet Game, is it?” Yona asked. “We played that at school last week and it was real boring.”

“No, it’s not the Quiet Game.” Esther thought for a moment. “It’s like the Quiet Game, but it’s a lot cooler.”  _ It’s got magic in it _ , she thought at them.

Yona considered this as Dvora led them up a short flight of stairs and into a bedroom with bunk beds and brightly colored wallaper. “Okay. If it’s really got magic in it.”

“Did somebody say magic?” Dvora asked.


	3. Collected Company

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Esther and Zofia go looking for answers, and find them where they least expected.

Teaching children to meditate was both harder and easier than teaching adults, On the one hand, Esther reflected, the twins knew the “sit still and follow instructions” drill from growing up in a household and a community dominated by Senate members. On the other hand, they were children, and they got bored easily and Esther was grateful to Zofia for repeatedly coming up with new images to focus on.

Over the course of the next hour, she began to sense Yona tuning in in spite of themself. Esther remembered the feeling of becoming fascinated by the way her own brain worked, but also slightly terrified by the disconnect it caused between brain and body and tried to transmit to Yona that this was what was supposed to happen and it wasn’t something to be scared of. Dvora was more fidgety, but Esther did catch her reacting to Yona once or twice in ways that suggested she was starting to tune into her twin's thoughts.

Now was not the time for a closer look, though; the lesson ended as voices began to drift up the stairway, mainly the voice of the twins’ father Arnost, who seemed to be leading the funeral service by reading from a procedural document that had been part of Esther’s basic training. Recognizing a word here and there shook her out of her mental quiet, and she recovered by suggesting that the twins pick the next game.

Dvora leapt to her feet and extracted a box from a bookshelf full of boxes; it contained a tray full of small gray marbles and four wooden mechanical devices shaped like maaka heads. “Hungry Maakas,” she explained as she set it up. “You press the button and it eats the marbles, and whoever eats the most wins.”

It turned out you had to press the button on the maaka’s back fairly hard to get the mouth to open. The noise of thumping on the machinery and the twins’ excited shouts drowned out the voices from downstairs, and after a few rounds Esther was able to focus on Zofia puzzling out the inner workings of the maaka heads. She wasn’t in her mother’s home; she was fine. As the game started to wind down, she was even ready to volunteer to go downstairs and bring back food.

* * *

At the hors d'oeuvres table, Esther caught herself glancing over her shoulder more than once, trying to catch the eye of someone who may or may not have been watching her. The feeling of being followed only got more intense as she escaped the central table and began to patrol the edges of the room, looking for people she knew. And her patrol was constantly interrupted by people she barely knew, cornering her to ask her life story and make subtly snide remarks about her “charity work” and her choice of spouse. She began changing the subject almost reflexively: “This really isn’t my event, right? Tell me about Obort,” but that tactic gave her neither relief nor information. She learned that Zunak had both absolutely loved and absolutely hated his job, that the Unified Sausage Standard was his magnum opus on which he had worked for nearly a decade, and that as far as anyone knew, a bookcase had fallen on him in his office shortly after it became law.

When Esther was finally able to slip away from an aunt-in-law asking after her mother’s health (improvising an answer from letters Tova had sent her), she quickly piled another plate with snacks for the twins and hurried back upstairs. Yona and Dvora exclaimed at the diversity and quality of the food, and Esther sat back against the wall, handed Zofia a pastry wrapped in a napkin, then closed her eyes and started counting breaths. “I’ve learned nothing,” she said once she was in control again. “And I need to get out of here.”

Zofia put an arm around Esther’s shoulders. “I know. We have to watch the twins though.”

“We’ll be fine,” Dvora said. “Mom and Dad make us go upstairs and be quiet sometimes. They won’t know you’re gone.”

“Are you sure?” Esther asked.

“If you go out the back door, nobody will see you,” Yona mumbled around a mouthful of cheese. “Dvora did it once and got all the way to the library before she got caught.”

Esther chuckled. There was hope for her niblings yet. “All right. We’ll be back by seven.”

* * *

“Where to?” Zofia asked once they were in fresh air again, in the alley behind Tova’s house.

“Hang on.” Esther closed her eyes for a moment and cast a finding spell. “Somewhere with wine, and maybe answers.” When she opened her eyes, a thread of white light no one else could see stretched out the door ahead of her. “This way.”

The thread ended at the door of a Torchlight Cafe with a LIQUOR LICENSE sign on the door above the traditional painting of a Rakdos hackrobat juggling torches. Esther and Zofia shrugged at each other, then Zofia pushed open the door and held it for Esther.

The cafe was bigger than the Torchlight on Gateway Plaza and nearly empty. The food behind the glass counter seemed simultaneously fancier and worse than Esther had had at Tenth District Torchlights--what exactly was in that breakfast sandwich? Behind the counter, a bored-looking teenage human with red and black striped hair leaned on a cash register, half-obscuring the chalkboard with the list of beverage prices.

Zofia approached the register while Esther studied the pastries in the counter. “Excuse me, do you have a wine list?”

“That one.” The cashier pointed over their shoulder to one of the boards.

“Okay, we’d like a bottle of the Cardinia red and...see anything good over there?”

Esther looked up. “Two protein packs and a basket of butter crescents.”

The cashier followed them to a table by the big front window and uncorked the wine with surprisingly little theatrics. It was not a bad wine, but not as good as the apple slices in the protein pack.

A large dog that had been lying under one of the occupied tables wandered over and sniffed at Esther’s hand. Esther looked up in the direction it had come from and saw three men in a variety of guild colors sitting about equally spaced around a table. The elf in Selesnya robes waved.

“Um, hi.” Esther pointed at the dog. “Can I pet your dog?”

“Sure!” exclaimed the goblin in Boros armor sitting to the right of the elf. “Valencia loves meetin’ people.”

“Well, it’s nice to meet you too, Valencia,” Esther said, patting the dog’s head. Zofia leaned over and gave Valencia a more confident skritch; Valencia let out a quiet happy boof and sat down to enjoy the attention.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” the elf said.

“No, we’re visiting from the Tenth,” Esther said. “For the Zunak funeral.”

“Oh,” said the elf. The goblin cursed under his breath. The third man, a human in new Azorius robes, sat with his mouth open, one finger raised as if he were trying to figure out what to say.

He finally decided on “You weren’t close to him, were you?”

Esther frowned. “No, he’s my sister’s brother-in-law.”

“Oh, good,” said the elf. The human was thinking hard.

“His obituary made it into the Tenth District newspaper,” Zofia explained, half to Valencia. “There was something weird into it that Esther wanted to investigate, so...I’m Zofia, by the way.”

“Hi~ I’m Molander,” said the elf. Esther wondered how he had managed to make that exact sound. Must be something they teach in the Conclave.

“I’m Nog.” The goblin.

“Avenir,” said the human, “of the Department of Manufacturing Standards.” The words fell over each other, as if he was trying to get them out of the way before he lost his nerve. “Obort Zunak was my supervisor, and we—plus a colleague from the Housing Bureau—were assigned to.” He cleared his throat. Nog and Molander seemed mildly impressed with this speech. “To get the Unified Ravnican Sausage Standard ratified.”

“The Unified...right. Obort’s project.”

“It was his baby,” Avenir said, and looked shocked that he’d phrased it that way.

Molander picked up the thread. “Like, he said he’d been working on it for so many years, and he just got so frustrated with nobody in the Senate listening to him, and he just went over the edge, you know?"

Esther shook her head. Zofia nodded.

“Anyway,” Nog explained, “he got so frustrated, and probably a little crazy if you ask me, that he decided the best way to make the world listen to him was to learn some old Gruul magic that let him summon Ilharg the Raze-Boar.”

“Summon what, sorry?” It was Zofia’s turn to be confused. Her hand froze above Valencia’s ear, and Valencia whined for the petting to continue.

“You know, the fire pig!” Molander exclaimed. The barista gave him a look, then went back to cleaning the coffee machines.

Esther took a long drink of wine before speaking. “I’ve read about this.” Never mind that she hadn’t known anything about Ravnica’s ancient history before about a month ago, and that the book had been on another plane entirely. “Ilharg is one of the Gruul old gods. There’s a couple of cults in the Undercity, but mostly it’s just the Clans using this massive fiery boar god as a metaphor for destroying Ravnica and returning it to nature or something.”

“Iiiit’s not a metaphor,” Avenir pointed out. “Zunak encoded a. Secondary declaration in the URSS that. Gave him access? to a.

“A ritual that would summon the Raze-Boar and let it destroy Ravnica,” Nog interrupted. “But we stopped him. Avenir here dropped a bookshelf on his head.” Avenir looked like he wanted nothing better than to sink into the floor.

“You can do that with law magic?” Esther asked. “I’m Lyev,” she added defensively. “I wasn’t taught how laws were made, just how to enforce them.”

Avenir waved a hand vaguely about. “Iiif you’re good enough at writing laws, it turns out, you can do that with law magic.” Molander nudged a mug in Avenir’s direction and he drank, hiding his face from further scrutiny.

“Wow,” Zofia said. Valencia appeared to understand that further skritches were not forthcoming and wandered back toward the other table. “That seems…”

“Yeah, I get why nobody at the funeral seemed to know what happened to him.” Esther remembered that she was hungry and addressed the rest of her thought to a crescent roll. “They wouldn’t believe any of that. And I’m not gonna be the one to tell them.”

“Seems wise,” Avenir commented from behind the mug. “Frankly, I’m surprised you believe us.”

“I’ve been...outside the realm of possibility once or twice.” Avenir set his mug down, looking eager to find out what Esther meant. She shook her head and he deflated.

Nog filled the silence. “So you’re an in-law of Zunak, does that mean you’re from the Sixth?”

“Yeah, I grew up in Goshan Heights,” Esther said. “Moved to the Tenth for Lyev training and got stationed out there. This is my first time back since then.

“Oh wow,” Molander gushed. “It must be tough, being away from home for so long. I left my vernadi for a week to do the sausage thing, and that felt like forever.” This tracked with what Esther knew of Selesnyan culture. Also Molander was remarkably easy on the eyes.

Esther caught herself staring and recentered herself. “Yeah, it’s weird to be back, but I’m glad I’m here.”

“Yeah, the Sixth District is a great place,” Molander went on. “Especially Izvir Umik, where I’m from. I think while you’re here you should come check out the hot springs.” This struck Esther as a weird direction to take the conversation, but not a particularly unwelcome one. “I could get you a guided tour~”

Avenir hid behind his drink again. “I’m so sorry about him.”

“Don’t be,” Esther said. A fanciful corner of her hindbrain was already planning a spa date. With Zofia, of course, but maybe also—“

And Zofia, as ever, had her back. “She needs the ego boost. It’s been a long year.”

“Tell me about it,” Avenir groaned.

Zofia grinned. “In fact, are you doing anything this weekend?” Esther wasn’t sure whether Zofia was teasing, or really meant to invite him along.

Avenir’s face turned bright red, and he almost choked on his drink. When he could almost breathe again, he spluttered something about a date.

“His girlfriend’s in the Rakdos,” Nog explained a little too loudly.

Avenir’s face somehow became even redder. Esther didn’t really think he should be embarrassed—dating a Cult member takes guts, if nothing else, and look at her own marriage, for Azor’s sake!—but she didn't think pressing the point would make him feel better.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to the LoadingReadyRun crew, whose Ravnica D&D campaigns brought the Sixth District to life. (The cafe scene is the entire reason this story exists.)


End file.
